Posts Tagged ‘Velocity 2010’

By now I have “touched” and been touched by dozens and dozens of participants in the O’Reilly Velocity conference. I did not meet any business executive (other than various CEOs/CMOs who pitched their companies from the podium).

No doubt, the O’Reilly Velocity conferences (this is the third one) are geek events. Having said that, IMHO these conferences are extremely important to the business executive. If you don’t attend you miss up on four value propositions:

Getting a sense of what the future in web operation holds.

Grasping what forthcoming advances in web operations mean to your business design. See for example my post Ops Driven Dev from earlier today.

Understanding the needs of a growing demographic sector that your business might not be able to access today.

Getting to know the kind of developers and sysadmins that probably work in the trenches of your company.

You owe it to yourself to consider attending Velocity 2011 if terms like “sysadmin 2.0”, “darkmode” and “devops” and do not resonate with you. I can’t give you “your money back” guarantee if you are not satisfied with the conference, but I will gladly pick the bar tab when we meet there.

Scrum set the flywheel in motion and caused the rest of the IT process life cycle to respond. ITIL’s processes still form the solid core of service support and we’ve improved the processes’ capability to handle intense work velocity. The organization adapted by developing unprecedented speed in the ability to deliver production fixes and to solve root cause problems with agility.

From what I gleaned yesterday in the O’Reilly Velocity conference I believe the tables are turning. Ops, or at least web ops, will soon drive development.

The reason for my saying so is quite simple: the breadth and depth of forthcoming web analytics unveiled in the conference. This is not “just” about Google making website performance part of their ranking algorithm. Everything related to web performance will soon be analyzed mercilessly under the “make the web faster” mantra. Dev will need to respond to analytics from operations with an unprecedented speed. For most practical purposes analytics run in ops will dictate the speed for dev.

The phenomenon actually goes beyond performance aspects. To be able to implement changes quickly, dev will need to be very good in ensuring the quality of fast changes. While quality has many dimensions to it, the most applicable one is test coverage. There is no way to change the code quickly without a comprehensive automated test suite.

For a devops project, start by establishing the technical debt of the software to be released to operations. By so doing you build the foundations for collaboration between development and operations through shared data. In the devops context, the technical debt data form the basis for the creation and grooming of a unified backlog which includes various user stories from operations.

I would actually go one step further and suggest including technical debt criteria in the release process. The code is not accepted unless the technical debt per line of code is below a certain pre-set level such as $2. The criteria, of course, can be refined to include specific criteria for the various components of technical debt such as coverage, complexity or duplication. For example, unit test coverage in excess of 70% could be established as a technical debt criterion.

Once such release criteria are established, the metaphorical flywheel starts turning in an opposite direction to that described in The Agile Flywheel. With technical debt criteria embedded in the release process, the most straightforward way for dev to meet these criteria is to use the very same criteria as integral part of the build process. The scheme for so doing in given in the following chart:

One last recommendation: don’t wait till Velocity 2011 to start on the path described above. Velocity 2010 already provides plenty of actionable insights to warrant starting now. Just take a look at the web site.